Salīḥ

Overview

Salīḥ is reckoned by the genealogists to Salīḥ ibn Ḥulwān ibn ʿImrān ibn al-Ḥāf ibn Quḍāʿah, which makes it a near neighbour of Kalb in the same arrangement, since Kalb is traced through Wabara ibn Taghlib ibn Ḥulwān. Its diyār are given on the Syrian marches, in the steppe country between the settled province and the desert. The tribe is remembered chiefly for one thing: the transmitted accounts describe it as the Arab power on that frontier before Ghassān, and its leading house — named in the sources as the Ḍajāʿim — as the collectors of the frontier's dues on behalf of the empire beyond it. This page describes a historical tribe and makes no statement about any modern family.

In the sources

The fuller narrative belongs to the Syrian frontier rather than to the genealogies. Salīḥ appears there as an established federate group, Christian like its Quḍāʿī neighbours, and then as displaced by the arrival of the Azdī tribe of Ghassān, which took its place in the same position. The story is transmitted as narrative, with the usual features of narrative — a named quarrel, a killing, a reversal — and it should be read as the historians of the frontier transmitted it, not as a documented sequence. After that displacement Salīḥ largely leaves the record as an actor, and the genealogists keep its place in the scheme without adding much to it.

Reading the name

Salīḥ with sīn should be kept apart in reading from the personal name Ṣāliḥ with ṣād, which is a different word entirely and belongs to a different root; in unpointed or hasty writing the two are easy to confuse, and the confusion runs in both directions. The nisba recorded from the tribe is al-Salīḥī. As with every nisba, it may mark descent, alliance (ḥilf) or clientage (walāʾ), and the compilers say which only when they know.

On lineage

Branch lists and affiliations here are given as reported by the classical genealogists, who themselves disagree. Nothing on this page establishes any living family's descent: a shared name may reflect descent, alliance (ḥilf) or clientage (walāʾ), and the sources usually say which only when they know.